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Restrepo

Squirrel

By Squirrel,
in Huddle Lounge

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Captroop Veteran

Captroop

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Should be available on demand from the nat geo channel.

Also the book is highly recommended as previously mentioned.

Good call, I just got Nat Geo channel, so maybe I have the movie.

As for the book, I'm almost finished with Lone Survivor now, so I might need a break from Military non-fiction.

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Epistaxis Newbie

Epistaxis

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Ah.

Lone Survivor.

Yeah, you should probably read

http://www.amazon.com/Victory-Point-Operations-Whalers-Afghanistan/dp/0425226190

to get a different perspective on that incident.

I'm not sure which account is 100% truth. Probably neither, as the truth is most likely somewhere in between.

I have spent the better part of a year studying that situation after reading Lone Survivor.

Something felt incomplete after reading it, coupled with all the liberal bashing.....left me needing more.

Heartbreaking, and when that community loses 19 people on one day, well, media attention becomes blinding.

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Captroop Veteran

Captroop

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Ah.

Lone Survivor.

Yeah, you should probably read

http://www.amazon.com/Victory-Point-Operations-Whalers-Afghanistan/dp/0425226190

to get a different perspective on that incident.

I'm not sure which account is 100% truth. Probably neither, as the truth is most likely somewhere in between.

I have spent the better part of a year studying that situation after reading Lone Survivor.

Something felt incomplete after reading it, coupled with all the liberal bashing.....left me needing more.

Heartbreaking, and when that community loses 19 people on one day, well, media attention becomes blinding.

The "sequel" to Lone Survivor is "Seal of Honor", the second hand account of the life and death of Lt. Michael Murphy.

Not as engaging as Lone Survivor, but a good read so far. I'm about a quarter the way through it.

Will have to pick up one or both of those. I'm leaning towards getting Victory Point because after reading LS, I really want to know how that campaign came to an end, what happened to "Sharmak" as they call him in LS after the battle.

And yes, Epi, the liberal bashing is a little off-putting, especially in the beginning, when I had just picked up the book, and the hate was especially thick.

What killed me in Lone Survivor is that the chopper went down before the rest of the 10th could get in the fight. I mean, 4 SEALs did that much damage, imagine what 8 more would have done to that decimated and demoralized Taliban army had they landed.

And also, I keep coming back to that part with the goatherders in the beginning. Would I have killed them? One of them was only a teenager? And like he said, shooting them would have been too loud, so you'd have to knife them all? That's pretty rough. I wonder what they would have done if they decided to kill them. Told them to get on their knees? Or just do it all of a sudden? How would they have done it?

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Epistaxis Newbie

Epistaxis

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Will have to pick up one or both of those. I'm leaning towards getting Victory Point because after reading LS, I really want to know how that campaign came to an end, what happened to "Sharmak" as they call him in LS after the battle.

And yes, Epi, the liberal bashing is a little off-putting, especially in the beginning, when I had just picked up the book, and the hate was especially thick.

What killed me in Lone Survivor is that the chopper went down before the rest of the 10th could get in the fight. I mean, 4 SEALs did that much damage, imagine what 8 more would have done to that decimated and demoralized Taliban army had they landed.

And also, I keep coming back to that part with the goatherders in the beginning. Would I have killed them? One of them was only a teenager? And like he said, shooting them would have been too loud, so you'd have to knife them all? That's pretty rough. I wonder what they would have done if they decided to kill them. Told them to get on their knees? Or just do it all of a sudden? How would they have done it?

I bought SEAL of Honor too.

Honestly, don't bother.

The author rehashes what you have already read, doesn't give you much on Lt. Murphy's life other than what you can pull from the web, and pretty much can't write for beans.

Not only that, he makes more than a few factual errors.

As far as Victory Point goes, understand that it is NOT an action packed book like Lone Survivor. In fact, that was one of the things that raised eyebrows for me about that book. It FELT like it was written to be a screenplay, not what I have become accustomed to when reading about the GWOT.

VP is a USMC, conventional forces view of the horrific actions of that day.

It is not a book the SOF community likes.

As to the goatherder question....that whole sequence smelled funny.

A vote? I doubt it. Perhaps a discussion, but Lt. Murphy was in charge. It is his call. AND, those ops get stepped on all the time, and the ROE doesn't matter. Zip tie, photo, exfil, get outta dodge. Killing those guys most likely wasn't on the table.

You know what, I need to shut my yap. I'm armchair QBing something I have no right to armchair.

But I will say this, when you write a book, Lone Survivor in this case, you do indeed open yourself up to scrutiny, so I don't feel too bad about it.

I pause only because the closest thing I have to "heroes" (I don't believe any human being is worthy of hero worship) are the guys in Special Operations.

That book just kinda stuck in my craw.

SPOILER: Sharmak is actually Ahmad Shah, not a bigtime Taliban or Al Qaida operative but a small timer that got lucky.

And then got killed much later at the Afghan/Pak border after the Marines chased his ass outta that valley.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Captroop Veteran

Captroop

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Restrepo just arrived from Amazon last night. I got it at about 10:30, and was so excited, I watched the whole thing last night.

It was an extremely affecting film. I've seen so many war movies and documentaries but nothing I have ever seen, as it turns out, accurately depicts soldiers in war as this does. The way they reacted during the heat of the firefights (The scene during Rock Avalanche where one of the soldiers, clearly Rugel's friend, hears about Rugel's death, breaks down, and the way the other soldiers try to console him mid-combat, was one of the most moving things I've ever witnessed), and how they acted in the lull. More than anything else it got me into the head of an American soldier in theater.

I actually had a hard time going to sleep last night because I was so full of emotion and thought. Will be watching this again, and recommending it to anyone who asks about it.

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